...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

Insightful essay, circa 1998: Idling away an hour before a doctor’s appointment, I happened to poke around in the bargain bins in front of a a nearby pre-owned book emporium. One of the intriguing books I came across (I ended up buying three for the grand total of $4) was one entitled The Ethics of War and Peace. A collection of scholarly essays published in 1996 by Princeton University Press, it’s an examination of Jewish, Muslim, Christian and secular perspectives on the subject. It cost me a whole buck—my bargoon of the week. If I could, I would post the entire essay by Bassam Tibi (described in the "Contributors" page as “professor of international relations at the Georg-August-University in Gottingen, where he also heads the Center for International Relations…”). Since I can’t find it online, here’s the conclusion, which offers a fairly good summation. Remember, it was published in 1996, back when many of us—moi included—hadn’t a clue about Islam and its imperatives (my bolds):

     In discussing the basic concepts of the Islamic tradition of war and peace, and their understanding by Muslims at the present, my focus has been on Muslim attitudes toward war. The ground for war is always the dissemination of Islam throughout the world. And in conducting war, Muslims are to avoid destruction and to deal fairly with the weak. Muslims do not view the use of force to propagate Islam as an act of war, given their understanding of the da’wa as an effort to abolish war by bringing the entire world into the “house of Islam,” which is the house of peace. For this reason, as we have seen, Islamic conquests are described by Islamic historians not as wars (hurub) but as “openings” (futuhat) of the world to Islam.

     Despite the universal religious mission of Islam, the world of Islam was a regional, not a global, system. The only global system in the history of mankind is our present international system, which is the result of the expansion of the European model. As we have seen, this modern international system has placed strain on the ethics of war and peace in Islam, generating the divergent responses of conformism and fundamentalism.

     Islamic war/peace ethics is scriptural and premodern. It does not take into account the reality of our times, which is that international morality is based on relations between sovereign states, not on the religions of the people living therein. Though the Islamic states acknowledge the authority of international law regulating relations among states, Islamic doctrine governing war and peace continues to be based on a division of the world into dar al-Islam and dar al-harb. The divine law of Islam, which defines a partial community in international society, still ranks about the laws upon which modern international society rests.

     The confrontation between Islam and the West will continue, and it will assume a most dramatic form. Its outcome will depend on two factors: first, the ability of Muslims to undertake a “cultural accommodation” of Islamic religious concepts and their ethical underpinnings to the changed international environment; and, second, their ability to accept equality and mutual respect between themselves and those who do not share their beliefs.

Looks like in the twelve years since the book was published—years that saw al Qaeda bombings of American embassies in Africa; two attacks on the World Trade Centre; the coming to the fore of Mahdi messianism in Iran and the mullahs’ support for Hamas and Hezbollah, jihadi organizations committed to a genocide of Israel’s Jews—“cultural accommodation” and “mutual respect” have been put on the back burner. That’s largely a function of the house of Islam, feeling ever more powerful due to the cravenness and cluelessness of the house of war, along with the self-confidence that comes from being awash in oil. Both globally and in Western locales, the house of Islam has been insiting that others do the accommodating, upon pain of being labelled insensitive, racist or Islamphobic should they fail to comply. Obviously, the essayist hadn’t even a inkling of the way things were going to pan out when he we wrote his thoughts in the downy, hedonistic days of the Clinton era. Was it only a mere ten years ago that we thought the most pressing crisis in America revolved around an avoirdupois intern who had a nifty way with a cigar?

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:52 | link | comments

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